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Commodore's Amiga Is Being Revived In Newly Updated Hardware (hothardware.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the blast-from-the-past dept.

MojoKid writes from a report via Hot Hardware: Although it has been over three decades since the first Commodore Amigas were originally released, a fan base for the beloved systems is still going strong. In fact, today's Amiga community seems to be more active now that it has been in years, and a number of exciting new hardware projects have cropped up in recent weeks. Two relatively new projects, led by popular members of the Amiga community Paul Rezendes and John "Chucky" Hertell, are designed to breathe new life into the Amiga 4000 and Amiga 1200.

Both men set out to reverse engineer the motherboards for these systems, not only to continue the possibility of repairing existing machines that are prone to serious damage from leaky batteries and electrolytic capacitors, but to potentially spur additional customizations for the platform in the future. Though Paul and John have only made minor modifications to the Amiga 4000 and Amiga 1200 motherboard PCBs to this point, the possibility now also exists for all new variants to arrive at some point in the future for these machines as well. The first actual working motherboards populated with components based on the Amiga 4000 Replica project or Re-Amiga 1200 haven't been shown off just yet, and they may require additional revisions to work out any kinks. However, both projects are good examples of the passion that still remains for the beloved Amiga from computing glory days gone by.

16 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. What, again? by Kenja · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Ah, never mind. I see this is about the same stuff as last time (Apollo etc). Sure, you could spend a bunch of money on a "new" Amiga, but at the end of the day it seems simpler to just run an emulator or FPGA system (I went with the later).

    --

    "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
    1. Re:What, again? by Excelcia · · Score: 3, Insightful

      at the end of the day it seems simpler to just run an emulator or FPGA system

      There is some truth to this. But I would not mind having a physical system. Not sure how much I'm willing to pay for this, but there is something to be had to have an actual Amiga. But then I'm the type who has kept a pair of actual Amiga Corp joysticks back from before their purchase by Commodore.

      The Amiga was one of those crazy amazing things where things just lined up in the universe to produce something that was an engineering work of art. The way tasks were offloaded onto hardware like that amazing programmable blitter, was a decade ahead of its time. One of the reason I don't mind supporting actual hardware is to support that. Commodore made many mistakes, to be sure, but companies like Microsoft ("who would ever want to run more than one program at a time?") who were beginning their rein of terror with their counter-marketing was at least equally to blame. The Amiga is in company with the Avro Arrow and the Tucker automobile - other projects that were light years ahead of their time.

      I hope the revival is successful.

    2. Re:What, again? by Kenja · · Score: 2

      Thus the FPGA systems like MiST etc. Physical joystick ports, dedicated hardware, can be used for other things and much cheaper than a used Amiga much less a new one.

      --

      "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
    3. Re:What, again? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      'Rein of terror' is not really what you'd think of as being an easily marketable product, but you'd be surprised at just how wealthy the four horsemen are and how much they'd be willing to spend on horse tack.

    4. Re:What, again? by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      But then you start looking at spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on upgrades and it just gets silly.

      These days there are hundred-dollar accelerators for Amigas, with enough RAM for gaming, so it's not that bad. On the other hand, having to re-cap them is a bit of a drag, and probably not worth it to most potential users. Emulation is better in its own way, because you can emulate multiple different models of Amiga, and some games (or other software) doesn't run well or at all on some models of Amiga, even with whdload.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    5. Re:What, again? by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Joystick ports were replaced by USB... it's easy to get a throwback joystick these days.

      Or if you must hack hardware, you can always use an Arduino Mega to get physical ports. There's really no good reason to use a classic joystick, though. They all sucked compared to a good gamepad. Literally all of them.

      With that said, actual Amiga users who want a mediocre gamepad which plugs into their Amiga can trivially hack a six-button mega drive pad to work. All six buttons are supported in all of four or five games; more games support three buttons, and vastly more support two. It involves swapping two wires, with a resistor added in series to one of them. I forget the details, but I did post about it on some amiga forum once I found the information online.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    6. Re: What, again? by CyberRacer · · Score: 2

      You touch on the importance of the Amiga (yes, I do miss my beautiful 2000/68030), but by and large emulators do run better today than than the originals. The point that's being missed is that it was a philosophy of design that made it so special. Take the things that suck up the most CPU cycles and offload them to hardware, then seemlessly (more or less) integrate them back into the os. Today gpus, soundcards, etc perform the same functions. In order for any "new" Amiga to be anything more than than just sentimentality on steroids, it's going to require an extension of the philosophy, and not just hacking on a few more modern ports. For example, one might consider incorporating machine learning, not just in hardware, but as an integrated part of the os as well. Anything short of that simply can't be competitive in today's market. Just for the record, I still fire up uae or winfellow once in a while to relive the heavy playing, heavy drinking glory days.

  2. Re:FCC by The+New+Guy+2.0 · · Score: 2

    The standards of today make computers a lot safer and easier to depose of... remember Tandys which would explode the capacitors if moved?

  3. Re:FCC by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Informative

    Amiga was never that noisy. They were used in low-rent broadcasting because of this. One of the major cable channel guides used it, I remember seeing it guru meditate. The machines were wholly shielded internally, including the all-in-ones. What makes you think they couldn't pass modern standards? Probably the only change which would have to be made besides updating the power supplies (which hobbyists have already worked around, by adapting standard ATX supplies) would be solder composition, for the only initialism you didn't actually remember to mention... RoHS.

    Also, you only need UL certification to get shelf space at a major retailer. I see you knew this, hence the "sort of", but mentioning it was still silly.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  4. Re:Nostalgia by The+New+Guy+2.0 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Raspberry Pi represents to our children what we were growing up with in the 90s... small processor and storage sizes, and dirt cheap hardware. There's many kid efforts in teaching computers that are just not discussed on Slashdot.

  5. Re:Typo? by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Funny

    Spotted the millennial. Shouldn't you be driving up the price of avocados or something?

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  6. Re:Nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm largely in agreement.

    However, I will note that an Amiga, or even a C64, was a much larger percentage of the household budget in the 1980's than today's Raspberry Pi which costs no more than a night at the (absurdly overpriced) movies.

    The Raspberry Pi and its copycats, like Odroid, are amazing computers for the price and vastly more versatile than Commodore was/is.

  7. Re:FCC by Known+Nutter · · Score: 2

    One of the major cable channel guides used it, I remember seeing it guru meditate.

    Prevue Channel

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    https://www.atlasobscura.com/a...

    --
    Beware of the Leopard.
  8. Re:what else is revived by TurboStar · · Score: 2

    That SID chip music will be back :)

    SID music never went away. Go to the High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC) and put 2018 in their search box. SID wasn't part of the Amiga chipset though.

  9. Re:Nostalgia by GuB-42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Amigas were not cheap. About the price of a midrange gaming PC in today's money. C64 were cheaper later on but that's still closer to entry level PCs than a Raspberry Pi.

    Also, the Raspberry Pi is a powerhouse compared to these old-school computers. It changes the way it is approached. You can fully understand an Amiga or C64, know every instruction, their timing and addresses. A RPi is always used through an OS, with many abstraction layers and things happening behind your back. Basically, old-school computers forced you to understand the hardware if you wanted to go further, but it was easy, now you don't really need to, and doing so would be much harder.

  10. Meh. Still not as cool.. by zawarski · · Score: 2

    ... as my Atari 800 w/ ATR-8000 and a pair of 8-inch floppies.